The Tale in Circulation: Reprints, Homespun, and the Folklore Canon

1931–2013 · how a Michigan storybook became two states' local history

The reprint: the book that carries the tale was kept in print by its own country. The Library of Michigan's author file records the Legends in the 1875 Allegan edition and in an authorized reprinting of 1956 by the Allegan County Historical Society — the tale's home county reissuing it, eighty years on, as a county keepsake. A story that is reprinted by a historical society is no longer merely published; it is endorsed, and the endorsement is part of the tale's papers.

The homespun carrier, 1931: the valley's own centennial history carried the tale up the river and graded it, in print, almost-history. Sue I. Silliman's St. Joseph in Homespun: A Centennial Souvenir (Three Rivers, Michigan, 1931) — its stories collected mainly by the Abiel Fellows Chapter of the D.A.R. and the St. Joseph County (Michigan) Pioneer Association — treats Littlejohn as the valley's authority: for the Indians of St. Joseph county, she writes, his Legends “are more than legend, though less than fact as they mirror the restless Indian life in the early eighteen hundreds,” and she retells his saga at chapter length as the region's Indian history — Mishawaha leading the skirmish line when her father fell wounded, Dead Shot as “the white hunter, lover and scout.” Even her retelling drifts: in Silliman's summary the unsuccessful lover is named Grey Wing, not Gray Wolf — a variant born in transmission, visible in print, in the valley's own souvenir book a year before Mishawaka cast its tablet. Her judgment of the source stands in this record as the tale's most consequential review: a D.A.R.-collected county history told its readers, in 1931, that the legends were more than legend.

The folklore canon: the tale's scholarly afterlife is the opposite motion — the folklorists filed it as folklore, which is to say they believed the telling and not the tale. Ronald L. Baker, Indiana's standing folklore scholar, prints the story in Hoosier Folk Legends (Indiana University Press, 1984) among the place-name legends, under the heading “Elkhart and Mishawaka” — the two city names carried as a pair of folk etymologies, Littlejohn's romance as their source; the city's standard encyclopedia article cites Baker, at page 179, as its authority for the legend. On the Michigan side the tale stands again in Sheryl James's Michigan Legends: Folktales and Lore from the Great Lakes State (University of Michigan Press, 2013). The pairing in Baker's heading is itself a finding: the same 1875 romance supplies the name-legend of the neighboring county, whose popular account makes Chief Elkhart a cousin of Tecumseh and father of the princess for whom Mishawaka was named — a second city's naming carried by the same fiction, printed here as circulation and flagged as Elkhart County's own file when that city's build comes. The modern low road of circulation runs beside the canon: the county genealogy page for Mishawaka states the folk version flat — “The city is named after Princess Mishawaka, daughter of Shawnee Chief Elkhart,” her romance with Deadshot and abduction by Grey Wolf — with no whisper that it is a story, which is how the tale now most often meets a reader looking for facts.

The schoolroom course, at the size the documents give it: the tale's place in the city's teaching is documented institutionally rather than in lesson plans. The Story of Mishawaka section records the standing civic fact — every Mishawaka schoolchild learns of Princess Mishawaka — and the schools' own record carries the mechanism: Mishawaka High School crowned a Princess Mishawaka annually in connection with the Central football classic, the 1943 yearbook naming Princess Rosemary Masters and her court, and the city's centennial princess of 1932, Virginia Ainlay, was a Mishawaka High student. The crownings and the contests stand whole in this history's Culture and Schools sections; what belongs here is the classification: for much of the twentieth century the legend's classroom was a coronation, and its textbook was a yearbook. No elementary curriculum or school reader carrying the tale stands in the record this section could reach; the gap is named, and the settling source would be the school corporation's own curriculum file and the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library's school-history holdings.

Sources:

1. Library of Michigan, Michigan Authors & Illustrators database, entry for Flavius Josephus Littlejohn — the 1875 edition and the “Allegan County Historical Society authorized printing 1956”; the entry's contemporary critical extracts on Littlejohn and the Legends.
2. Sue I. Silliman, St. Joseph in Homespun: A Centennial Souvenir (Three Rivers, Mich.: Three Rivers Publishing Co., 1931), chapter I — “more than legend, though less than fact”; the saga retold with “Grey Wing, the intrepid but unsuccessful lover”; the stories' collection by the Abiel Fellows Chapter, D.A.R., and the St. Joseph County Pioneer Association, per the volume's front matter.
3. Ronald L. Baker, Hoosier Folk Legends (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) — “Elkhart and Mishawaka” among the place-name legends (contents, as catalogued for the Internet Archive edition); cited at p. 179 by the “Mishawaka, Indiana” encyclopedia article for the legend.
4. Sheryl James, Michigan Legends: Folktales and Lore from the Great Lakes State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013) — the tale's Michigan-side collection, as cited by the same article.
5. “Elkhart County, Indiana,” encyclopedia article — the popular but non-historical account of the county's name (Chief Elkhart, cousin of Tecumseh, father of “princess Mishawaka”), traced there to Littlejohn's 1875 collection.
6. “Mishawaka, Saint Joseph County, Indiana,” county genealogy page (freepages.rootsweb.com) — the folk version stated as the city's naming fact, without qualification.
7. This history, Culture and Schools sections — the high school's annual Princess Mishawaka crowning (the 1943 Miskodeed, Princess Rosemary Masters), the 1932 and 1983 contests, Virginia Ainlay; spine section — “every Mishawaka schoolchild learns of Princess Mishawaka.”